Three Days

He woke in his own bed. The lamp was burning on the table beside him, and his wife was asleep in the chair beside it, her head on her arms. The room was exactly as he had left it; yet he felt as though he had walked a long way.

His first thought was that it had been a dream — a vivid, terrible dream, the kind that stays with a man through the morning. He rose, washed, and sat down to breakfast; but the look on his own face in the mirror was not the look of a man who has slept. It was the look of a man who has been promoted.

His father noticed it over the porridge. "You look like a different son," the old man said, half laughing. Song did not laugh. He took his father's hand, and his wife's hand, and told them, as simply as he could, what had happened to him the night before.

They stared at him. His wife wept. His father was silent a long time, and then said, very quietly, "You have never told me a lie. If you say it, it is so."

For three days Song moved through his small affairs with a calm that frightened the people who loved him. He went through his papers and put his accounts in order. He divided his few books among his pupils, writing each name on a flyleaf. He walked out into the lane and greeted the neighbors he had known since boyhood, as though he were going on a long journey.

On the second day he sent for the carpenter and chose the wood for a small tablet, inscribed with his own name and the date. He gave instructions that it was to be set in the new city temple of the western county, and that on the first day of every month his father should come and burn incense, if his legs would carry him.

His wife, through her tears, asked him if there was no way out. Song shook his head. "The appointment is not mine to refuse," he said. "I have been examined by just judges. A man does not decline an office that heaven has offered him."

On the evening of the third day he ate a simple supper with his family and made them laugh with old stories, so that the house, for an hour, was almost as it had always been. Then he went to his room, lay down on his bed, and composed himself as though for sleep.

His wife, sitting beside him, held his hand. He smiled at her, said her name once, gently, and closed his eyes. When she called him, he did not answer. The lamp burned on. Outside, the cock crowed for the fourth dawn.

They buried him on the fifth day. The village was puzzled. He had been a healthy young man; there had been no illness. But his face in the coffin was so composed, so like a man who has been given a post he is glad to fill, that no one dared say he had died too soon. His father walked behind the coffin with a steady step, and told himself, over and over, that his son had not been taken — he had been promoted.